Papers by Yasemin Tezgiden Cakcak
Language education has been marked by centralized curricula, pre-packaged, teacher-proof, commerc... more Language education has been marked by centralized curricula, pre-packaged, teacher-proof, commercial materials, and standardized tests in the neoliberal era (Gray, 2013; McGrath, 2013). This system deskills teachers and reduces them to the role of technicians, who are supposed to teach the coursebook verbatim (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). Critical language teacher education, however, aims to foster language teachers’ agentive potential in analyzing, selecting, adapting and developing materials. Critical language teachers critique and problematize existing materials for the visible or hidden curricular and cultural messages they convey (Gray, 2013) and they feel empowered to design critical materials with the participation of their students (Crookes, 2013). This chapter provides a blueprint for teachers and teacher educators to pedagogize critical material analysis and development.
International Perspectives on Critical English Language Teacher Education: Theory and Practice, 2024
Language education has been marked by centralized curricula, pre-packaged, teacher-proof, commerc... more Language education has been marked by centralized curricula, pre-packaged, teacher-proof, commercial materials, and standardized tests in the neoliberal era (Gray, 2013; McGrath, 2013). This system deskills teachers and reduces them to the role of technicians, who are supposed to teach the coursebook verbatim (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). Critical language teacher education, however, aims to foster language teachers’ agentive potential in analyzing, selecting, adapting and developing materials. Critical language teachers critique and problematize existing materials for the visible or hidden curricular and cultural messages they convey (Gray, 2013) and they feel empowered to design critical materials with the participation of their students (Crookes, 2013). This chapter provides a blueprint for teachers and teacher educators to pedagogize critical material analysis and development.
Language teacher educator (LTE) identity development
is an emerging field exploring how LTEs lea... more Language teacher educator (LTE) identity development
is an emerging field exploring how LTEs learn to teach
and negotiate their identities and how their identity
construction processes help teacher candidates learn.
The complexity of the issue has prompted researchers
to explore their professional journeys and experiences
in various contexts from differing perspectives. Still,
the field is constantly evolving as LTEs strive to
understand the multifaceted nature of the profession
and its implications for teacher education. Within this
perspective, through a duoethnographic study, in this
research the authors aim to explore how they construct,
negotiate, and enact their critical LTE identities and
agency as two Turkish-speaking, mid-career English
language teacher educators situated currently in two
different higher education institutions in Türkiye.
The researchers collected lengthy personal narratives
recounting their experiences and thematically analyzed
them through iterative coding. Three major themes
concerning their meso and micro contexts emerged:
their trajectories in becoming LTEs, issues of belonging
and marginalization, negotiating their LTE identities,
and exercising agency. Their narratives indicate how
they followed different trajectories to become teacher
educators, were positioned as others in their institutional settings, legitimized their LTE identities in time, and became empowered to practice their aspired identities. Despite being marginalized in different contexts, their narratives show they have consistently created counter-hegemonic discursive and experiential spaces in their classrooms and institutional contexts as micro-level policy-makers enacting their critical LTE identities.
Reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Why did it feel empowering to me?, 2021
Celebrating the work of Paulo Freire for his healing influence, this
paper gives an auto-ethnogra... more Celebrating the work of Paulo Freire for his healing influence, this
paper gives an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s personal, pedagogical and
political liberation process reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Raised in a conservative patriarchal middle-class atmosphere in central Turkey, the
author analyzes her own story of liberation as a woman, as a young scholar, as nonnative English-speaking language educator and a citizen of a democratic republic.
The author describes how she realized her own subjugation by reading Freire (2005)
at a time of personal and political crisis and how she tried hard to find her personal
voice. She also depicts the impact of the book on her pedagogy, on her relationships
with students and on her liberatory praxis. Finally, the author tells how she
transformed her understanding of the dynamics of social transformation reading
Freire’s dialogic, problem-posing pedagogy of the oppressed.
Moving Beyond Technicism in English Language Teacher Education-Lexington Books, 2019
This book chapter tells the story of a young female committed English teacher working at a public... more This book chapter tells the story of a young female committed English teacher working at a public school in a remote village in eastern Turkey. Aspiring to work as a transformative intellectual, she chose to be assigned to a public school right after finishing her undergraduate studies. Towards the end of her first semester in teaching, she started to feel uneasy by the patriarchal hegemony at the school and village and she decided to take her first bold step by preparing a school bulletin board on the theme of women. This was indeed an important move in a conservative patriarchal village school where mothers of children had never visited school. Later on, she raised the issues of child brides, violence against women and gender roles in her 5th grade and 8th grade classes. Inspired by students’ positive responses, she decided to hold a women's meeting at the village school in the following semester. She prepared invitation cards and invited each woman in the village by paying individual visits to their homes. On a snowy day, 40 women came to school and talked about their individual experiences for three hours. Thereafter, women started to visit school regularly, which boosted the teacher’s efforts to increase students’ academic achievement. She worked with parents to build “muscles and nerves” (Gramsci, 2000, p. 320) in her students to study for the standardized exams. At the end of her second year at the school, students scored high on English tests, which gave them access to having education at high schools in the city. This chapter traces the roots of this novice teacher’s commitment and intellectual courage and interprets her success from a critical lens.
Ağustos 2019'da Amerikalı bir yayıncı tarafından İngilizce olarak basılan akademik/bilimsel kitab... more Ağustos 2019'da Amerikalı bir yayıncı tarafından İngilizce olarak basılan akademik/bilimsel kitabımın bilgisini ve fotoğraflarını sosyal medyada paylaştıktan sonra İngilizce bilmeyen ama ne yazdığımı merak eden aileme ve tüm dostlara kitapla ilgili Türkçe bilgi verme ihtiyacı hissettim. Her ne kadar kitabın İngilizce basılması uluslararası düzlemde mesleki ve akademik bir izleyici kitlesiyle buluşmasını sağlayacak olsa da Türkçe basılmış olmaması insanda bir burukluk duygusu da yaratmıyor değil. Umarım kitabın kısa zamanda Türkçesi de çıkar ya da eğitime dair Türkçe kitap da yazabilirim. O kitaplar çıkana dek şimdilik kısa bir bilgi notunu paylaşmış olayım sizlerle.
Lexington Books, 2019
Drawing attention to the threats that an overreliance on teaching techniques poses for teacher cr... more Drawing attention to the threats that an overreliance on teaching techniques poses for teacher creativity, student voice, and the well-being of democracy, Moving beyond Technicism in English-Language Teacher Education advocates a critical approach to education. Using the author’s own personal experiences, this book offers a critical analysis of the technicist English-language teacher education programs introduced by Turkey’s Council of Higher Education in the neoliberal period. Beginning with the implementation of critical education at the Village Institutes in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the book documents how teacher education practices in Turkey evolved from liberatory to mechanic with the influence of the Cold War. By demonstrating the author’s own critical teacher education practices, the book explores the impact of critical teacher education on pre-service and in-service teachers’ perceptions and practice. Highlighting the ethical responsibilities of educators, the book calls for a critical, democratic, and humanizing approach to teacher preparation.
by Yasemin Tezgiden Cakcak, Hasan H. Aksoy, Ebru Eren, Jim Manley, Fatma Mizikaci, Mustafa Öztürk, mustafa sever, Brian Stone, Barbara Veltri, Joe Wegwert, and Pelin Taşkın EDUCATION • COMMUNICATION " Coming together for what may seem an unlikely collaboration of schola... more EDUCATION • COMMUNICATION " Coming together for what may seem an unlikely collaboration of scholars from Turkey and the United States, each of these teachers of conscience (hocam) grapple with authentic inquiry into forms of teacher authority to ground effective and sustained struggle for freedom. They work within and against the naked instrumentalism of global neoliberalism that seeks to annihilate citizen agency as it transforms all levels of schooling into preparation for a new world order of alternative facts, exponential economic exploitation, and unfettered ravaging of the planet. As these progressive colleagues bear witness, the fire of their passion and the courage of their action inspire a profound sense of urgency that compels readers to take new action. " —CAROLYNE J. WHITE, Rutgers University-Newark " Can teachers save nations? Has democracy really slipped into the abyss in the teaching profession in Turkey and also in the United States? This courageous book, the brainchild of Fatma Mızıkacı and Guy Senese, ushers a brave clarion call in essays for all of us who revere and respect the teaching profession, democratic academic process, and the treasured ultimate outcome: enlightened, caring students. Truly a collection to ponder and use as a basis of action to calibrate the profession. " —FRANKIE HUTTON, NJ State Amistad Commissioner " A Language of Freedom and Teachers Authority seems to be a product of serious effort, especially in its focus on the topics rarely discussed in Turkey. I believe this reading inspires teachers and academics to withstand in defiance of their freedom in the classroom even though they have to teach in a hegemonic system. In this regard this book is a big contribution to the field as it particularly addresses practitioners. " —RIFAT OKÇABOL, Boğaziçi University A Language of Freedom and Teacher's Authority: Case Comparisons from Turkey and the United States explores dimensions of authority that are deeply embedded in the profession of teaching. It examines critical dimensions of the foundations of Turkish and United States public education, both of which are under new pressures due to changes in the relationship between public schooling and current reforms in education. This book invites reader to explore the interrelated and highly-differentiated connections between the Turkish and American senses of state, local, and traditionally cultural notions of the teacher, the teacher's profession, and the shifting notions of teacher autonomy toward conformity and uniformity.
In line with the spirit of neoliberalism intensifying commodification of "native" speakers of Eng... more In line with the spirit of neoliberalism intensifying commodification of "native" speakers of English , there is a growing trend in Turkey's linguistic market . Private schools (K-12 schools and language schools) present local "non-native" English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) with high linguistic capital as "native" Englishspeaking teachers (NESTs). Those NNESTs with high fluency and so-called "standard" British or American accents are asked to lie about their personal and linguistic backgrounds and to behave as if they are monolingual NESTs. Some institutions even officially assign fake English names to them. I call this dehumanizing practice in Turkey's private school market "pseudo-native-speakerism." In this feature article, I briefly report a mini-scale qualitative study narrating the impact of this policy on the wellbeing of "pseudo-NESTs" as well as their relationships with their students.
Native English speaking teacher of English/non-native English speaking teacher of English (NEST/N... more Native English speaking teacher of English/non-native English speaking teacher of English (NEST/NNEST) inequity has been a well-documented reality in the foreign language education field. Interpreting the dichotomy of NEST/NNEST from Freire's theoretical perspective, this article provides insights into the internalization of native speakerist ideology by large numbers of non-native teachers of English. Using Freire's understanding of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, this article argues that non-native teachers of English are divided beings: they are both themselves and the consciousness of the native speaker they internalized. Following Freire's liberatory pedagogy, this article suggests a dialogical problem-posing education for overcoming NEST-NNEST inequity in English language teacher education in Turkey.
Paolo Vittoria ile kitabı Paulo Freire: Diyaloğun Pedagojisine Giden Yol üzerine konuştuk.
ODTÜ'de 2016 yılının bahar aylarında Eleştirel Pedagoji Okumaları Grubu adıyla bir okuma grubu ku... more ODTÜ'de 2016 yılının bahar aylarında Eleştirel Pedagoji Okumaları Grubu adıyla bir okuma grubu kuruldu. Dünyayı farklı şekilde okumak isteyip de eğitim fakültesinde aldıkları derslerde tam olarak aradığını bulamadığını düşünen kimi lisans öğrencileri ile derslerde tam olarak odaklanmak istediklerine odaklanamadığını düşünen kimi hocaların girişimiyle bir araya geldi bu grup. Aslında Freire'nin " kültür çemberleri " ne benzer bir arayıştı bu: sözcüğü ve dünyayı okuma arayışı, birlikte öğrenme, birlikte düşünüp birlikte eyleme girişimi. İlk iş olarak Ezilenlerin Pedagojisi okundu … sonra dönülüp dönülüp tekrar okundu, tekrar tartışıldı bu kitap. Eleştirel pedagojiyi keşfetmekti aslında bütün mesele. Okumalar tartışmaları açtı, tartışmalar yeni soruları getirdi. Eleştirel pedagoji ile devrimci eleştirel pedagoji arasında ne fark vardı örneğin? Türkiye'deki yansımaları nelerdi? Bizler ne yapabilirdik? Nasıl ulaşabilirdik daha çok kişiye? Kendimiz daha çok nasıl öğrenebilirdik? İşte oluş halindeki bu serüvenin öyküsü böyle başlıyor. Bu yol nereye uzanır, nereye ulaşır henüz bilmiyoruz ama hem kendi dönüşüm sürecimiz üzerine düşünmek, hem de paylaştıklarımızı çoğaltmak için Eleştirel Pedagoji Yayın Kurulu üyelerinden Murat Kaymak'ın önerisiyle bu yazıyı kaleme almak istedik. Kendimiz sorduk, kendimiz yanıtladık.
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921-1997) 20. yüzyılın en büyük ve etkili eğitim düşünürlerinden biri... more Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921-1997) 20. yüzyılın en büyük ve etkili eğitim düşünürlerinden biri olarak kabul edilir. Freire'nin Brezilya'da ortaya çıkan ve dünyanın pek çok bölgesinde hayat bu-lan eğitim düşüncesi, ölümünün (2 Mayıs 1997) ardından yaklaşık yirmi yıl geçmesine karşın günümüz eğitim dünyasını hala tüm canlılığıyla aydınlatıyor. Kitapları yeniden basılıyor, yazıları bir-çok dile çevriliyor, yaşamı, eserleri ve eğitim yöntemi üzerine yeni çalışmalar yapılıyor. Freire'nin eğitim düşüncesi ve kendi adıyla anılan yöntemi Brezilya'da başlayan ve ardından dünya geneline yayılan yetişkin okuma-yazma çalışmaları üzerinden şekillenmiştir. Bu nedenle Freire'nin düşüncesinin gelişiminde onun okuryazarlık deneyim-leri kilit önemdedir ve bu yüzden onun okuryazarlık anlayışını tümüyle betimlenmeden onun düşünsel evreni tam anlamıyla an-laşılamaz. Okuma-yazma çalışmalarında geliştirdiği yaklaşımı toplumsal dönüşüm, baskı biçimleri ve bunlar için eğitimin sundu-ğu olanaklar üzerine odaklanmıştır. En genelde Freire'nin okur-yazarlık ve halk eğitimi anlayışı, toplumsal eşitlik için halk örgüt-lenmesi olarak değerlendirilebilir. Buradan da anlaşılacağı üzere, onun düşüncesinde eğitim, siyasal alandan bağımsız değildir. Eği-timsel olan ile siyasal olan arasında güçlü bir bağ vardır ve bu ne-denle Freire, eğitimin yansız olamayacağını ifade eder. Ona göre biri yansız bir eğitimden söz ediyorsa aslında egemen olandan yana olduğunu ifade ediyordur.쇓 Freire'den eleştirel pedagoji akımına kalan en büyük mirasın kısaca " eğitim yansız değildir " saptaması olduğu söyleyebilir.
Saadet Özkan isimli öğretmen Mayıs 2014'te İzmir'in Menderes ilçesi Sancaklı köyü Ahmetçik İlkoku... more Saadet Özkan isimli öğretmen Mayıs 2014'te İzmir'in Menderes ilçesi Sancaklı köyü Ahmetçik İlkokulu'nda çalıştığı dönemde okul müdürünün kız öğrencilere cinsel istismarda bulunduğundan şüphelenerek müdür odasının kilidini bozmuş ve müdürün 8 yaşlarında 6 kız öğrenciye cinsel içerikli film izlettiğinin ve istismarda bulunduğunun açıklığa kavuşmasını sağlamıştı. Tacizci müdür 1,5 yıl tutuklu kalmasının ardından salıverilmişti. Ancak Saadet Öğretmen'in çabaları sonucu baro, kadın dernekleri ve sendika temsilcilerinin de verdiği destekle söz konusu müdür Haziran 2016'da yapılan duruşmada yeniden tutuklandı. Dava sürecinde birçok engelleme girişimiyle karşılaşan, olay sonrası trafik kazası geçirip 6 ay yatağa mahkum olan, bu durumu açığa çıkardığı için kendisine "suçlu" muamelesi yapılan Saadet Öğretmen Mart 2017'de ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı'nın verdiği Uluslararası Kadınlar Cesaret Ödülü'nü Melanie Trump'tan aldı. Gösterdiği büyük cesaret ve kararlılıkla birçok eğitimciye esin kaynağı olan Saadet Öğretmen Eleştirel Pedagoji dergisinin sorularını yanıtladı.
2016 yılı Türkiye için birçok açıdan karanlık bir yıl oldu. Ülkenin dört bir yanından gelen habe... more 2016 yılı Türkiye için birçok açıdan karanlık bir yıl oldu. Ülkenin dört bir yanından gelen haberler, ülkenin tüm kurumlarına sirayet eden çürümüşlüğün resmini açıkça ortaya koyarken ister özel ister devlet kurumu olsun farklı kurumlarda çalışan emekçilerin anlattıkları hikayeler, "bozuk düzende sağlam çark" olarak kalmanın ne denli güçleştiğini gözler önüne serdi. Farklı kurumlarda çalışan pek çok kişi tanık oldukları durumu benzer sözlerle ifade etti: "Türkiye'de makro düzeyde ne yaşanıyorsa mikro ölçekte de aynıları yaşanıyor." Birçok eğitimci, gerek kurum yöneticileri, gerekse meslektaşları tarafından farklı yöntemlerle yıldırılmaya çalışılırken öğrenciler ciddi bir fiziksel, cinsel ve psikolojik taciz ile karşı karşıya. Tüm bu olumsuzluklara rağmen Türkiye'nin pek çok yerinde eğitim emekçileri, öğrenci ve veliler eğitim kurumlarına sahip çıkmaya ve her tür tacize karşı mücadele etmeye çalışıyor. Bu yazı Naomi Klein'ın "şok doktrini" olarak tanımladığı, yaşanan bir doğa felaketi ya da ülke içi bir kriz durumunda toplumun birçok açıdan felce uğramasını fırsat bilen "felaket kapitalizmi" karşısında emeğiyle çalışan herkesin maruz kaldığı işsizlik, yoksulluk, korku, baskı ve şiddet sarmalının ne şekilde işlemekte olduğunun altını çizerken bu döngüden onun adını koyarak çıkabilmenin yollarını arıyor. Şok doktrinin farklı yüzlerini ve umudu Nazım Hikmet'in dizelerine yer vererek ifade ediyor. Umudun şiddet, baskı ve taciz ortamına rağmen ayakta kalabilmek için farklı biçimlerde direnen insanlarda ve onların dayanışmasında olduğunu anımsamak için öğrencilerini, kendilerini ve okullarını bu basınçtan korumak için uğraşan kimi dönüşümcü eğitimcilerin hikâyelerini anımsatarak sona eriyor.
In this chapter, I first describe the theoretical lens of the study followed by a brief outline o... more In this chapter, I first describe the theoretical lens of the study followed by a brief outline of the Turkish socio-political context, including the operations of higher education and teacher education system. By providing a historical background, I intend to present the reader with a more comprehensive understanding of the current political and academic atmosphere in Turkey. After that, I describe the study with the findings, which I interpret from a critical perspective, attributing teacher educators' relative lack of authority to the ideological hegemony constructed by the ruling classes. While some teacher educators and emeritus professors stated that they worked under the pressure of the Council of Higher Education (CoHE) in Turkey, some seemed to have internalized the operation of the system. I argue that working in an intellectually constraining space, participating teacher educators appear to suffer from ideological proletarianization and they resort to Derber’s (1983) defensive mechanisms of desensitization and/or ideological cooptation to be able to survive.
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Papers by Yasemin Tezgiden Cakcak
is an emerging field exploring how LTEs learn to teach
and negotiate their identities and how their identity
construction processes help teacher candidates learn.
The complexity of the issue has prompted researchers
to explore their professional journeys and experiences
in various contexts from differing perspectives. Still,
the field is constantly evolving as LTEs strive to
understand the multifaceted nature of the profession
and its implications for teacher education. Within this
perspective, through a duoethnographic study, in this
research the authors aim to explore how they construct,
negotiate, and enact their critical LTE identities and
agency as two Turkish-speaking, mid-career English
language teacher educators situated currently in two
different higher education institutions in Türkiye.
The researchers collected lengthy personal narratives
recounting their experiences and thematically analyzed
them through iterative coding. Three major themes
concerning their meso and micro contexts emerged:
their trajectories in becoming LTEs, issues of belonging
and marginalization, negotiating their LTE identities,
and exercising agency. Their narratives indicate how
they followed different trajectories to become teacher
educators, were positioned as others in their institutional settings, legitimized their LTE identities in time, and became empowered to practice their aspired identities. Despite being marginalized in different contexts, their narratives show they have consistently created counter-hegemonic discursive and experiential spaces in their classrooms and institutional contexts as micro-level policy-makers enacting their critical LTE identities.
paper gives an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s personal, pedagogical and
political liberation process reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Raised in a conservative patriarchal middle-class atmosphere in central Turkey, the
author analyzes her own story of liberation as a woman, as a young scholar, as nonnative English-speaking language educator and a citizen of a democratic republic.
The author describes how she realized her own subjugation by reading Freire (2005)
at a time of personal and political crisis and how she tried hard to find her personal
voice. She also depicts the impact of the book on her pedagogy, on her relationships
with students and on her liberatory praxis. Finally, the author tells how she
transformed her understanding of the dynamics of social transformation reading
Freire’s dialogic, problem-posing pedagogy of the oppressed.
is an emerging field exploring how LTEs learn to teach
and negotiate their identities and how their identity
construction processes help teacher candidates learn.
The complexity of the issue has prompted researchers
to explore their professional journeys and experiences
in various contexts from differing perspectives. Still,
the field is constantly evolving as LTEs strive to
understand the multifaceted nature of the profession
and its implications for teacher education. Within this
perspective, through a duoethnographic study, in this
research the authors aim to explore how they construct,
negotiate, and enact their critical LTE identities and
agency as two Turkish-speaking, mid-career English
language teacher educators situated currently in two
different higher education institutions in Türkiye.
The researchers collected lengthy personal narratives
recounting their experiences and thematically analyzed
them through iterative coding. Three major themes
concerning their meso and micro contexts emerged:
their trajectories in becoming LTEs, issues of belonging
and marginalization, negotiating their LTE identities,
and exercising agency. Their narratives indicate how
they followed different trajectories to become teacher
educators, were positioned as others in their institutional settings, legitimized their LTE identities in time, and became empowered to practice their aspired identities. Despite being marginalized in different contexts, their narratives show they have consistently created counter-hegemonic discursive and experiential spaces in their classrooms and institutional contexts as micro-level policy-makers enacting their critical LTE identities.
paper gives an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s personal, pedagogical and
political liberation process reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Raised in a conservative patriarchal middle-class atmosphere in central Turkey, the
author analyzes her own story of liberation as a woman, as a young scholar, as nonnative English-speaking language educator and a citizen of a democratic republic.
The author describes how she realized her own subjugation by reading Freire (2005)
at a time of personal and political crisis and how she tried hard to find her personal
voice. She also depicts the impact of the book on her pedagogy, on her relationships
with students and on her liberatory praxis. Finally, the author tells how she
transformed her understanding of the dynamics of social transformation reading
Freire’s dialogic, problem-posing pedagogy of the oppressed.
The findings of the study suggest that the foreign language teacher education program does not have a specific mission. According to the document on program outcomes, the FLE program aims to educate a reflective practitioner. The interview data and observation findings, however, demonstrate that even though there are some reflective dimensions of the FLE program, it seems to prepare teachers for becoming technicians more than it encourages them to become reflective teachers. The interpretation of findings from a critical perspective indicated that the technicist focus in the FLE program probably stems from the neoliberal economic policies adopted in Turkey. Turkish teacher education system shaped by the Council of Higher Education under the impact of international organizations seems to prefer to educate technician teachers discouraging them from taking active leading roles in the system.
This study was conducted with the participation of one pre-intermediate English preparation class at Afyon Kocatepe University, School of Foreign Languages and their teacher. The three-week strategy instruction was given by the classroom teacher according to the lesson plans developed by the researcher. The data were collected through classroom observation, vocabulary learning strategies questionnaires, learner and teacher interviews and learning diaries.
The analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the strategy instruction had a positive impact on strategy use, but it failed to create a significant increase in learner perceptions of usefulness. However, both learner and teacher
attitudes were positive towards strategy instruction.
This study implied that instruction in vocabulary learning strategies may have a role to play in the university level Turkish EFL context, as it may contribute to the learner independence by encouraging students to reflect on their own learning process.
Key words: Vocabulary learning strategies, strategy instruction, language learning strategies, learner autonomy.
Case Comparisons from Turkey and the United States
Edited by Fatma Mızıkacı and Guy Senese
With Yasemin Tezgiden Cakcak and Sharon Gorman
“Coming together for what may seem an unlikely collaboration of scholars from Turkey and the United States, each of these teachers of conscience (hocam) grapples with authentic inquiry into forms of teacher authority to ground effective and sustained struggle for freedom. They work within and against the naked instrumentalism of global neoliberalism that seeks to annihilate citizen agency as it transforms all levels of schooling into preparation for a new world order of alternative facts, exponential economic exploitation, and unfettered ravaging of the planet. As these progressive colleagues bear witness, the fire of their passion and the courage of their action inspire a profound sense of urgency that compels readers to take new action”. — Carolyne J. White, Rutgers University-Newark
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A Language of Freedom and Teacher’s Authority: Case Comparisons from Turkey and the United States explores dimensions of authority that are deeply embedded in the profession of teaching. It examines critical dimensions of the foundations of Turkish and U.S. public education, both of which are under new pressures due to changes in the relationship between public schooling and current reforms in education. The contributors reflect on varied dimensions of authority, of which ideals are shifting under political and economic pressures. In both Turkey and the U.S, public education reflects the early influence of secular equalitarianism, revolutionary democratic developments, and an Enlightenment-based sense of the human right to education. Against this, we see the opposing dialectic where state control and curricular censorship and constriction appear too often.